fi-linx

Last year, we chatted about how the One Laptop Per Child project offered a special, buy one, give one special for their laptops.  For$399, you get an OLPC and one is donated to a child in need.  The promo, however, was plagued by logistical challenges and did not perform nearly as well as the OLPC [...]

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Lending Tree is getting sued for a dreaded, TJ-Max-esqe data breach.  Apparently caused by some of their partners, Lending Tree managed to lose names and social security numbers for a number of their clients.  It serves a great reminder, that even the biggest institutions are not immune for data theft.  This is particularly important to [...]

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For the past few months, we’ve been working with CUES to develop a partnership between our two companies and it has finally come to fruition.  The press release has gone out, websites updated, and the fun can now begin!  We’re greatly looking forward to working with CUES and can’t wait to serve the CUES membership. 
PS - [...]

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Big news today from ING Direct: they have acquired ShareBuilder, the online brokerage firm for $220M. 
This could have a dramatic impact on the offering ING has for its customers and the products (and pricing) ShareBuilder has to offer.  With ShareBuilder’s $4 investment fee, the barrier to entry is pretty low to get into investing and [...]

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In doing industry research about CU’s need for Deposit Reclassification, I’ve stumbled upon some interesting statistics.
CU’s with more than $40M in checking accounts are the target market for Deposit Reclassification.  If all of them were to reclassify their deposits, the average CU with more than $40M in checking would make $352K a year.  Some of [...]

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I’m really curious to see how the battle of the personal finance sites plays out in the next year or so.  Mint announced this morning that they’ve raised $4.7M in VC money.  Wesabe has some VC backing, but not nearly that much.  While I prefer the Wesabe model of the community helping each other find [...]

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